How do you deal with team members that ramble on and dwell on a subject?

I’m looking for advice for how to take action and keep the team aligned during meetings. Focus and information overload are reoccurring issue that have caused meetings to consistently run over. What can be done in 30 minutes is usually done in an hour due to tangents.

Intrinsically, I know that solutioning should be kept to a minimum as it tends to steer the conversation away from completing action items. Unfortunately, I’ve voiced my concerns several times and the team fails to improve on that note.

“I think it’s very important to figure that out and I’ll take it as an action item to send you a recommendation, but our time here is short and it’s hard to get on your calendar... we have X minutes left to figure this out. Now given Y, what is your stance on...”

Yeah, but if you’re a little long winded with it then you take the conversation back over and you end it with a question that redirects the discussion. Also, telling an exec to simply “take it offline” is not real tactful.

Set an agenda and define the problem and a recommendation within the agenda. If it strays away from solving the problem, say “I think it’s important to solve that too, but we will need a separate discussion for it. Right now we need to evaluate whether the recommendation I’ve laid out solves the problem in the agenda.”